The boy genius and the mogul

by Daniel Stashower

A biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, the unknown inventor of the 20th century's most influential technological innovation-television-combined with the inventor vs. mogul business story of Farnsworth's struggle against RCA's David Sarnoff to capitalize on the medium. The world remembers Edison, Ford, and the Wright Brothers. But what about Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, an innovation that did as much as any other to shape the twentieth century? That question lies at the heart of The Boy Genius and the Mogul, Daniel Stashower's captivating chronicle of television's true inventor, the battle he faced to capitalize on his breakthrough, and the powerful forces that resulted in the collapse of his dreams. The son of a Mormon farmer, Farnsworth was born in 1906 in a single-room log cabin on an isolated homestead in Utah. The Farnsworth family farm had no radio, no telephone, and no electricity. Yet, motivated by the stories of scientists and inventors he read about in the sci